


A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out

by SS_Chaos_Sauce



Category: KFAM - Fandom, King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Lovesick Au, Soulmate AU, you want angst motherfucker here you go
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-06 22:03:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17353439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SS_Chaos_Sauce/pseuds/SS_Chaos_Sauce
Summary: Sammy Stevens had a soulmate is Jack Wright. Now that Jack is gone, Sammy is sick, and it will only get worse from here.





	1. Soulmate Deprivation

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, I know the title is from a P!atd song, leave me alone. Hopefully I’ll actually write the other parts of this fic, bls let me know if I should continue, but I might regardless of y’all like this

**Phase** **1**

 **Time**   **S** **ince**   **L** **ast** **C** **ontact** : 3 weeks

 **Symptoms** : Headaches, fatigue, dizziness, nausea

 

Sammy felt like shit. His mouth tasted like beer and stale cigarettes. He dragged himself out of bed and into the bathroom. He brushed his teeth and splashed water on to his face to wake up. His head pounded, but he chalked that up to last night’s guilt spiral and his old friend Jack Daniels. He grabbed some aspirin and headed to the kitchen for coffee.

 

He took his coffee black and the acid made his stomach turn, threatening his nonexistent breakfast. He leaned against the counter, hands wrapped loosely around his mug. His eyes were fixed on the empty blue mug in the sink. It was Jack’s mug, still unwashed, untouched.

 

One month. Jack had been gone for one month. Sammy hadn’t left his house in one month. The only reason he was alive was that his neighbor had made him a casserole every Sunday that she dropped off before church. For one month all he’d done was eat, sleep, drink, and ignore phone calls. He just felt so tired and empty without Jack. He was incomplete. His phone rang, grinding against his temples. He checked the caller ID as he silenced the phone. Lily, again. He sighed and rubbed his face. Lily went to voicemail and Sammy went to take a shower.

 

“ _Sammy. Pick up your damn phone. Do you even listen to theses? This isn’t healthy, Sammy. You can’t spend all of your time sulking. You need to get out of the house, come visit Pippa and me, or Christ, just go to the park! You need to get over yourself. It’s been a month- and I’m not saying to get over him, fuck that, but you need to stop wallowing and pitying-_ ”

 

Sammy hung up on the voicemail. Every message was the same. “Come outside, Sammy.” “Grow up, Sammy.” It’s not like Lily ever came to see him. All she was was a voice on the other end of the phone. He tossed his phone on his bed and dropped down beside it. His whole body was exhausted despite only having been awake a few hours. He needed a nap to rid himself of this hangover. Maybe when he woke he wouldn’t feel so bad.

 

He felt worse. He woke up with his head swimming and his stomach in his throat. Currently he was hunched over the toilet, desperate to throw up. Unsuccessful, he leaned back against the wall. He didn’t have a fever, but he felt awful anyway. He managed to keep down a bottle of water and some aspirin. He grabbed his laptop and crawled back to his bed. The bright screen burned his eyes, but it was a worse pain when his laptop booted and showed him his wallpaper. It was him, Jack, and Lily, all smiling at the camera at Jack’s graduation. He quickly opened a browser and made a stupid decision. He typed his symptoms into the search bar. He scrolled through diagnoses ranging from common cold to brain cancer until his eye caught on a strange collection of words. “Soulmate Deprivation: Symptoms of a Lovesick Soul”

Shit.


	2. Pen to Paper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phase 2: Sammy does some light reading.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanna thank y’all for the kind words, y’all really encouraged me. That being said, y’all brought this on yourself. I know its short, but that's how I roll.

Phase 2

Time Since Last Contact: 4 Weeks

Symptoms: Joint/Muscle Pain, Itching, Dry Mouth

 

Sammy didn’t believe in the supernatural. Vampires, ghosts, cryptids, curses, all crap. He didn’t believe in soulmates either. There wasn’t a great big match making force binding him to Jack. They loved each other for each other, not because fate said so. There was no such things as soulmates, and therefore, no such thing as soulmate deprivation. He still felt like shit.

 

Jack was gone, he was alone, and he had was a broken heart and a broken body. It had been a week since he started to get sick. Now, his knee and hip ached constantly and he felt like ripping off his skin. The only comfort he found was reading Jack’s old journal. Jack used to take it everywhere, keeping track of appointments, and making small notes throughout the day, but as it got closer to the day he disappeared he wrote in it more and more, frantically scribbling at all hours. Now, the worn leather warmed in Sammy’s hands as he opens the book.

 

_I think Lily has found us out, I never was one for keeping secrets, but I don’t want to scare Sammy. I’ll try and ease him into it, but I don’t think I want to keep our relationship a secret anymore. I want to shout it from the rooftops. ‘I love Sammy Stevens!’ Hear that world! I’m in love with Shotgun Sammy, and I won’t hide it any longer._

 

This passage was dated the day before Lily had burst into Jack’s apartment to find him and Sammy making out. Jack has turned bright red, and so had Lily. Sammy smiles and flipped forward a little.

The smile dropped off his face.

 

_Something is wrong with me. Nothing feels right anymore. I keep getting these calls from her. I don’t know how to make it stop. I don’t know if I want to._

 

He flipped forward more.

 

_Sammy, I love you. I love you. I love you. I’m sorry. I don’t want to go. I’m scared. I love you._

 

Further.

 

_Be well, King Falls, I’m coming._

 

The words made his stomach turn. It was the last entry. Hands shaking, he grabbed his laptop from beside him. It was time to do some research.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I live! I create! I love y’all!


	3. Road Trip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sammy makes up his mind, sends an email, and makes a pit stop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience! Busy month, lots of tests. Take this sad as my thanks

Phase 3  
Time Since Last Contact: 6 Weeks  
Symptoms: Tunnel vision, hot flashes, fainting, nausea

_Merv,_  
_Thank you so much for your generous offer to host the late night program in King Falls, and I would be honored. I’ll be driving down first thing this weekend and we can hopefully discuss contract details in person._

_Yours,_  
_Sammy Stevens_

He hated email, nothing ever sounded sincere. This Merv guy has emailed him back almost immediately after his first inquiry into the radio host position down at King Falls Am, but then ghosted Sammy for two weeks after. Now, it was almost May. That’s when he had said he could start the job. He had a week to pack up all of his and Jack’s things and drive down to this little podunk town. The idea made him sick. He pushed himself up from his desk, then immediately buckled to the floor, his vision almost blacking out. Shit.

How was he going to drive 16 hours of he couldn’t stand up. Sammy lay on his bedroom floor and waited for his vision to clear. He realized he was sweating. The article he read about this quote unquote lovesickness had said that their were four main phases, and judging by his sudden nose dive, he guessed he was in the third phase. The most extreme phase, but it only lasted a few days at most. Then, the fourth phase, but Sammy wasn’t ready to think about that yet. Instead he slowly brought himself up. He wasn’t going to risk his chance at finding Jack. Head pounding, he pulled a duffle from his closet and began to pack.

It wasn’t a lot of work considering. It turned out that Jack had packed a lot before his disappearance, and that just left Sammy to pick up the knick knacks and odd ends. Clothing was easiest, he didn’t really need to pay attention to it, just fold it and stuff it into the bags. Then he moved on to books. These were harder. Jack had so many books, and Sammy would stop to leaf through the annotations, feeling the cracked spines and soft pages. Jack’s magazines were also tough. He used to dog ears topics he wanted to research. The newer issues had page after page of incoherent sticky notes marking odd phrases and sights. The words “be well” were highlighted dozens of times. The sight of them made Sammy sick. Next up was the hardest part. Sammy moves slowly through the house, a laundry basket tucked in his hip, and picked up the odds and ends that Jack had left and that Sammy had left undisturbed like artifacts in a museum. A discarded card game, a wilting succulent, his messenger bag. He made his way to the bedroom. Jack’s absence was palpable in here. A wave of nausea overcame him and he perched on the bed. His hand pressed in a lump under the covers and Sammy’s already constricted stomach dropped. He pulled at the blanket to reveal the worn, well loved thing. A stuffed bear, a little bigger than his hand, with a ripped ear and a soft, discolored tummy. Lily-bear was Jack’s oldest friend. Tears slipped off his face and landed on the bear. Sammy held it, letting tears run down his face, and mourned for the first time in two months. And as sudden as it had come, he dropped the bear in the laundry basket. He grabbed the luggage, taking the first trip out to the car.

By the time he had the car fully packed it was well past 3 am. Sammy got in the car. He drove to Lily’s apartment, she lived in one of those open air complexes. He grabbed the basket of Jack’s things from the back and dropped it on the doorstep. He left the clothes as well. All Sammy kept was Jack’s journal. It was his only clue. He got back in the car, and he drove. He drove, stopping frequently, sometimes to eat, to get a coffee, to pee, to throw up his guts in the side of the interstate, until he drove through the mountain pass separating the world from the hell that was King Falls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ilyall!! (pst I think we'll meet Ben next time...(;) S/o to the kfam discord who i make read this first and then get mad at me, love you!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my love Mana who literally handed me this au. You want angst? Motherfucker? Here you go. Ilyall


End file.
